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An anonymous reader writes A grandmother agreed to purchase an old building in Chiba, which is just outside of Tokyo. When her family arrived to check out the contents of the building it was discovered that the first two floors used to be a game center in the 1980s. Whoever ran it left all the cabinets behind when it closed, and it is full of classic and now highly desirable games. In total there are 55 arcade cabinets, most of which are the upright Aero Cities cabinets, but it's the game boards that they contain that's the most exciting discovery.Boards include Donkey Kong, Street Fighter Alpha 2 (working despite the CPS2 lockout chip's tendency to kill old boards), and Metal Slug X.

How can they expect to be believed when they say crazy stuff all the time. The IRS thing is a joke. Just because the head of the IRS took the 5th and their hard drives failed 10 days after receiving a letter asking what the heck was going on means nothing. The whole cancel our contract thing with the back up company was nothing other than a coincidence. this stuff happens all the time. I am a Systems Manager. Everyday we lose emails off local hard drives

Ohh. If you do not like something Obama does you are crazy and love all Republicans.

Bush reacted to 911 with the Dept of Homeland Security, The Patriot Act and the TSA. All things I fault him for. I am not sure of an Embassy attack under Bush that took place where we had very little security even as the British and the Red Cross were pulling out due to the dangers "We never saw coming".

Petty people put all of their politics in small boxes labled "D" or "R". Mostly. I beli

the whole story is over romanticized and not even technically true, there are posts about it on some of the arcade collector forums with more informationwww.jammaplus.co.uk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=63536

I find it more fascinating when pieces of rare Japanese culture appear outside of Japanmamedev.emulab.it/haze/2014/06/07/whac-a-bison-vega/

there was a bubble bobble 2 prototype arcade machine from nearby there dusted off only a blip of time ago too

Also Japanese are super tidy and maintain things despite them not being used.

Actually, this is incorrect. They may be a generally clean and tidy people, but they typically *don't* maintain buildings - they re-build many (if not all) of their temples every few years rather than perform maintenance. Couples almost never buy used homes - that's why there's so much odd arcitecture in that country; you don't have to worry about resale value because everyone's just going to demolish the building anyways.

There was a neat bit about it on an NPR economics podcast a few months ago, if you're

It wasn't; although there are '80s cabinets in there, the hardware in a lot of the pictures is late '90s or early 2000s vintage, and one of the articles suggests it has been closed for about ten years. Given that there's been a recession on that entire time, it might be that the value of the space didn't justify the cost of clearing out all those machines.

Gambling is illegal in Japan but also extremely popular and a mainstream pass-time for many people. They get around the law in various ways. For example many machines let you win non-monetary prizes (which are legal) that a little shop around the corner from the pachinko parlour conveniently pawns for a fixed amount and sells back to the pachinko operators again.

Or little slips of gold or silver, encased in plastic so they're legally classified as a "novelty item" or "jewelry", but the grade & weight are stamped on them, so you know you're holding, for example, 5 grams of 24K gold, and you know the exact value of it (pending knowledge of current precious metals, of course, but what's stopping you from downloading the Kitco app?). But hey, it's not actual (paper/coin) money, so there's no legal issue;)

For a lot of reasons really. First of all, the article doesn't say where in Chiba prefecture this find was made, while there is a small part of Chiba prefecture that is close to Tokyo(including the part that is home to Tokyo Disney), the prefecture itself is quite large and includes a large peninsula that is quite a long distance from Tokyo.

Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.

Secondly, even in Tokyo proper if you travel to any point in the city that is more than a 10-15 minute walk from a station(and there are plenty of them) you will find plenty of run-down and abandoned buildings. Property in Tokyo seems to follow an inverse square law, the value is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the closest station.

Which begs the question- would it be worth someone's time to buy some of these unwanted out-of-the-way buildings and then fund (possibly fully) the construction of a line and station covering that area?

That quite obviously wouldn't be cheap- to put it mildly- but given the ludicrous value of some buildings and land in Tokyo, the returns could be huge.

would it be worth someone's time to buy some of these unwanted out-of-the-way buildings and then fund (possibly fully) the construction of a line and station covering that area?

I have no idea if this is true for commercial buildings too, but there was a freakonomics podcast episode (2/26/2014 "Why are Japanese homes disposable?") that described that homes aren't built to be long lasting in Japan. Would definitely be worth researching before trying to do this.

A lot of old programs relied on some very specific behaviour of chips to perform accurately. They'd exploit bugs in the microcode or timing imperfections to make their games small and efficient. Older games did a lot of very weird crap to get around limitations of the time. I remember reading quite fondly how the makers of Monkey Island 2 hacked their way around the scene where you dive to the bottom of the ocean to make the blue fade to black scene work despite not having a colour palate setup to do so.

What typically happens is if you faithfully emulate what an old console is supposed to do then at best a game plays with minor bugs, at worst it becomes completely unplayable. Correctly emulating an old console on the other hand is a processing nightmare which can bring multicore 3GHz machines to their knees. What really happens is that the people who write emulators figure out how the original game exploited the hardware configuration and then code the emulator to look at which game is currently being played and apply an appropriate hack to make it work. I.e the emulator works differently depending on the game.

Trivial nonsense would actually prevent you from playing the game at all in some cases.

My colleague is currently designing a C65 in an FPGA [blogspot.com.au], currently running at 28.9x the speed of a C64 but with lots of features still unimplemented. But even designing the hardware at that level, it will be difficult to be completely bug compatible. Particularly since he's driving 1920x1200 video over HDMI.

Ever played Asteroids? If you haven't played it on the original arcade machine, chances are you're missing out on a large part of the experience because it runs on a vector monitor. Those beautiful glowing bullets simply don't show up on raster hardware in close to the same way. Same can be said for Star Wars - the sit-down vector monitor game was incredible.

I'm speaking as someone who has an arcade cabinet running MAME, and who regularly uses emulators on a Mac as well. I'm not perfectionist for a lot of the standard stuff, but I do appreciate that in some cases there are material differences to the real thing.

In my limited experience, you need a LOT of pixels for a vector emulation to look good on an LCD display. One of my all-time favorites is Gravitar, and the lines are just a bit too faint with a 1080 display, unless you crank things up. (specifically on my 17" MacBookPro, but I haven't tried it with recent emulators)

I think vector games might look pretty good on a 4K monitor, especially one with retina resolution. And then you won't have to worry about the vector driver hardware flaking out and spewing line

It's not just pixels. The concept of resolution on a vector monitor is funny, but yeah, higher resolution will look better. The other issue is brightness. On the original console with the vector monitor, the bullets were *bright*. Much brighter than anything else on the screen. I'm thinking that to show something that looks like that on a raster display, you'd need something like the Brightside HDR (High Dynamic Range) technology. That's now being licensed as Dolby Vision.

You must be a glutton for punishment. I was very active in the Mac emulator scene many years ago (provided hosting for MacMAME.org, etc.) and recently looked into it again, only to be very depressed by what I found. I had assumed that with the growing mainstream popularity of Macs over the past decade that emulator availability would increase but I found just the opposite. In fact, it seems like it's a PITA just to get a current version of MAME up and running, let alone MESS. The old sites and message board

Just seen this - hopefully you read the reply. For MAME I have a real arcade cab with an old PC inside it, so I don't use the Mac for that. For the rest of the emulation scene on the Mac though, take a look at Open Emu [openemu.org], which has a lot of what's useful. Other ones I use are for Commodore - Vice64 for the C64, UAE for the Amiga.

When I was about 15, there was a Laundromat down the street with an old Asteroids game where the vector monitor worked fine except that the beam never turned off, so you could see how it sat dead center in the screen most of the time, then drew a line from one asteroid to the next, to the next, etc. as it rendered a frame.

Let me guess... eventually it burned a hole all the way through the centre of the screen until one day it got through and (a) blasted the woman whose job it was to collect the change from the machines' head off or (b) lasered her, segment-by-segment- via an early-80s pseudo-computer-effect- into the Asteroids machine itself where she was forced to play life and death computer games and interact with anthropomorphic, sentient realisations of abstract computer concepts, while finding some way to prove that sh

Fighting games. The move durations, defensive reaction times, and openings are all measured in frames. Timing is absolutely critical. In high-level play, you may only have an opening of a handful of frames in which to land an attack...and that's at 60 frames per second.

If your game isn't running 100% frame-accurate (Try as they might, emulators really don't), you might as well be button-mashing.

That's why those of us who care about that sort of thing take extreme [giantpachi...ofdoom.com] measures [giantpachi...ofdoom.com] to ensure an authentic experienc

It also gives emulator programmer a reference point for correct behaviour, and information on how that behaviour was originally achieved which might be useful. Aren't we reaching the stage where low-level simulation of original hardware is possible for the simpler cabinets?

We are, but since emulation is such a niche subject (we can't even emulation the NES 1:1 despite its massive popularity and widespread availability), its extremely difficult to find people (with the skills/talent/knowledge) willing to put in the time to dive in that deeply.

Not to mention the legal difficulties (yes, I know emulation is technically not illegal, but that doesn't stop companies from sending cease-and-desist orders which immediately scares most people away).

For those of you who aren't aware, this is true. Older games, especially from the 80's, used graphics systems that used very little RAM, instead the graphics all being stored in EPROMs. The background images were one layer, with hardware that usually supported scrolling, and the foreground (or 'motion graphics') images in another set of EPROMs, with specific hardware to place said objects at specific locations on the screen, and yet another layer of graphics just for text images like player scores. Completely different from the bitmap graphics that everything uses now. The reason was the price of RAM. The exception to the rule was Williams games like Defender, Stargate, Joust, Robotron 2084, Bubbles, and other similar era titles, that used 3 banks of 4116's for a total of 48kB of bitmap graphics memory, with DMA used to move graphics data from EPROMs to the screen buffer. Since there was no 'standard' for any of this hardware you'd have to write an emulator for each and every different game. Then there's sound. Pacman/Ms. Pacman used a very simple discrete sound generator using a couple bipolar ROMs; you'd have to code specifically for that, or cheat and use PCM samples. Galaxian actually had a hardware PRNG connected to a simple resistor-ladder DAC and some low-pass filtering to generate white noise for things like explosion noises. Really, I learned a hell of a lot about electronics back in the day from having to learn how these boards all worked, so I could repair them effectively (not like there was tech support for repairing any of this stuff or troubleshooting manuals!)

It might have been 4-bit equivalents of sinewaves, I never actually looked at the data, I was doing well just being able to get blank PROMs and having a programmer at the time to burn new ones with for repair purposes. I'm pretty sure one of the two PROMs was part of a simple state-machine that governed how the sound generator worked, though. Haven't actually looked at the schematics for years and years..

There isn't really a story here. There may be a few classics here, but this is no golden age arcade, especially considering the stock of late era look-alike candy cabs. If this arcade had been mothballed and locked-up in, say, 1983 or 84, that would be cool. Otherwise, there isn't anything very special here.

I haven't seen one of those old arcades in ages. You could walk into any mall in the 80's and hear the centipede game from halfway across the mall. The one I spent a lot of time in had a very distinctive smell of electronics and carpet cleaner. I could play Spy Hunter as long as I wanted to on one quarter, and my sister could do the same thing with Galaga. I remember being horrified the first time I wandered into a mall in Florida and realized they didn't have an arcade. That situation became more and more common as time went on. I think the demise of the American mall is in some way linked with the demise of the American video game arcade.

yea... i remember how awesome it was to get 5 bucks out of my mother and then literally run to the "dream machine" arcade. There was also a big arcade in it's own building the next town over that we used to go to once we got car licenses. We'd play robotron for hours, as well as some of the other classics. I think the downfall of the arcade was - well I remember when they started replacing "skill games" with the "hack and slash" genre of games. "hack and slash" being - games where you'd fight or someth

I think it's more that consoles caught up with the arcades. The last arcade I went to was maybe five years ago, while on vacation in Virginia. Most of the games there were console ports - they had a Soul Calibur 2 machine at a time when Soul Calibur 3 was already out on consoles, the ever-present DDR machines (also ported to PSX/PS2), a couple of Street Fighter machines (available at the time on XBLA and PSN in HD remake form) and that was about it.

I think the only games I'd actually want that aren't ported are Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and MvC 3, both of which are highly unlikely to be ported again since Disney bought Marvel.

MvC2 is on xbox live arcade and playstation store, I have it on dreamcast (as well as a proper port of Xmen vs Street fighter the reason I bought dreamcast), MvC3 has two different Editions on PS3 and XBox360

oh gotcha, yeah MAME will do MvC2 if you spend a weekend matching versions and fiddling with configs, depending on your hardware, but good luck with MvC3. I vastly prefer Steam ports to MAME, since they are so much more polished, and hassle free, but yeah... they don't want your money, apparently.

I haven't seen one of those old arcades in ages. You could walk into any mall in the 80's and hear the centipede game from halfway across the mall. The one I spent a lot of time in had a very distinctive smell of electronics and carpet cleaner. I could play Spy Hunter as long as I wanted to on one quarter, and my sister could do the same thing with Galaga. I remember being horrified the first time I wandered into a mall in Florida and realized they didn't have an arcade. That situation became more and more

There were three arcades in the mall near where I lived in the '80s, a proper arcade, a bunch of cabs next door at the movie theater, and a few more cabs next to the Montgomery Ward's entrance. Now that mall is the headquarters of an internet hosting company. [rackspace.com]

I was in college in the early '80s, and could play Gravitar for like half an hour on a quarter, and two-fisted Gauntlet, pumping dozens of quarters into one character to get a high score on another character that had a single quarter. (high scores were

I'm pretty sure removing the arcades back in the 90s and oughties was a deliberate strategy by the Malls to remove the unwanted guests -- teens and tweens. They certainly villianized that demographic in other ways, often enacting policies to discourage that demographic from hanging out in the food court, loitering in the mezzanines, sitting quietly on the benches . . . having an arcade just attracted them like flies to roadkill, so they had to go. Since the demographic was viewed as not having much to spen

more than anything else. Same goes for Arcades. $0.25 cents had a lot more buying power 30 years ago, but then again so did everything else. Arcade operators needed to raise prices to $1 or more a play to be profitable, but very few people can throw that kind of money away for 5 minutes of entertainment. If you're going to hang out at a mall for hours on end you need enough disposable income to do stuff.

I've seen a lot of harebrained theories about what cause the 80's game crash, but fact is it was just

Anybody got tips on unloading them? With something like eBay, it seems you either limit yourself to a tiny fraction of the audience for local-pickup only, or freight charges can dominate the sale price.

For anyone thinking about it, they're simpler than computers, and not t

Everyone seems to be pushing up the date this place closed. Sensationalizing the time capsule perhaps? TFS says 80s. TFA says early 90s. One of the games in the photos is "Cherry Master '97". Hmm... I wonder how much research it would take to determine when that game came out? "Early" 90s indeed. So the place was open at least until 1997.

I live in Tokyo, and I've seen tons of similar-looking arcades close within the last 10 years I've been here, including some in very recent years. Video arcades are still somewhat of a thing here in Japan, unlike most other countries - though they are rapidly disappearing here as well. As others have pointed out, judging by some of the games pictured, this arcade hasn't been closed for more than maybe 10-15 years at the very most, and I'll bet it's actually a lot less than that.
I should mention that I do

You're flat out wrong. Kenya has a better pay-by-cell-phone infrastructure than the US or Italy do, and it's a completely homebrewed solution. Their government even has had to develop a proper legal framework for virtual subcurrencies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... [wikipedia.org]